MOVIE REVIEW- Geezer porn: O'Toole hopes for one last score

Peter O'Toole showed the world he could act 44 years ago in Lawrence of Arabia and hasn't had to prove anything since, although he's proved it dozens more times anyway. He proves it again in Venus, though he just has to act old, which at 74 is hardly a stretch.

O'Toole plays Maurice Russell, an aged thespian who still works but spends a lot of time in a coffee shop with Ian (Leslie Phillips, perhaps best remembered from the Carry On films a lifetime ago), another actor, sometimes joined by a third, Donald (Richard Griffiths). Their combined ages are well north of 200.

In one touching scene, Maurice and Ian dance in a church, almost literally on the graves of their fellow actors. Maurice also occasionally visits his ex-wife, Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave, whose scenes are too few and too brief).

The plot kicks in when Ian announces his niece's daughter, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), 19, is coming to stay with him. She needs lodging in the city, and he can use help with cooking and cleaning up. Before the girl has been there 24 hours, Ian's screaming for help. He doesn't like anything about her and is too used to living alone to have someone underfoot.

Maurice, on the other hand, likes everything about Jessie, especially her age and gender. He nicknames her Venus after taking her to an art museum. He also takes her to the theatre and she takes him to a club. Jessie says she wants to be a model, so Maurice hooks her up with a job as a life model for an art class, mainly because he wants to watch. The Venus of Velasquez' painting was, after all, nude.

Their cultural exchange might be touching if Maurice didn't constantly leer at her like the dirty old man he is. Jessie quickly learns to play him, carefully rationing his treats. One day he's allowed to touch her hand, another to kiss her shoulders– "three kisses – as reward for his kindness and generosity.

There's no fool like an old fool, and the disgustingness of what Maurice wants to do is exceeded only by the teasing way screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) and director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) suggest he may eventually succeed, even though he candidly admits he may not be up to the task.

Oh, it's not too much worse than some of the screen romances Hollywood has expected us to take seriously over the years, as popular actors aged while their love interests were replaced by newer models (e.g., Entrapment, with Sean Connery, 68, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, 29), back when every studio head was putting his own midlife crisis on the screen in one picture after another.

The critical consensus seems to be that since Maurice is toothless and presumably dickless, his intentions are not to be taken seriously and thus are no cause for alarm. I might concur if I believed Maurice wasn't hoping for that staple of crime movies, one last score, and if the film weren't toying with Maurice's contemporaries in the audience to give them a rooting interest.

O'Toole is superb, and the other actors quite good; the writing is brittle enough to avoid sentimental sandtraps, and the direction makes it all seem tasteful on the surface. But in the long run Venus is just high-class geezer porn.